Robot hand has 100% win rate in rock, paper, scissors

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You would think we as a species could find a single physical activity that we’re better at than robots. They can already lift more weight, move more quickly, and run continuously without the need for sleep. We used to at least have rock, paper, scissors, but not anymore. The University of Tokyo’s rock, paper, scissors bot has gotten an upgrade and now it’s completely unbeatable.

The robot hand was already capable of choosing the correct item to beat its human opponent 100% of the time was shown off last year. It used a high-speed image sensor to track the opponent’s hand as it moved into position. By determining what the human was about to use — rock, paper, or scissors, the robot could simply choose the winning object. However, it took the robot hand itself about 20 milliseconds to react to the command. That meant it came in noticeably after the human. You could tell it was cheating.

The new version of the hand is still capable of knowing the outcome of your hand signal before you’re finished, but now the actuators and motors can whip out the right hand gesture in about 1 millisecond to win every single time. It’s actually rather amazing to see how fast the hand can react to a new visual input.

Is this cheating? Almost certainly, but robots don’t play by the same rules as we humans. The robots can beat us 100% of the time at rock, paper, scissors and we’re going to have to live with that. The problem comes when they start beating us at games that matter.